Key seats the place Labour might get a ‘super-majority’
The rise of Nigel Farage‘s Reform UK party threatens to turn an already healthy majority for Labour into annihilation for the Conservative Party.
Last week’s seismic YouGov poll, which put Reform ahead of the Tories for the first time, was the so-called ‘crossover’ moment that Rishi Sunak had dreaded.
Senior Tories, led by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, are now openly vocalising a previously private fear: that Farage’s candidates will split the Right-wing vote so seriously that ‘socialist’ Sir Keir Starmer will win a super-majority which will give him a ‘blank cheque’ in Downing Street.
When the election was called, there were 357 Tory MPs in the Commons. This is likely to fall to 200 – at best – on July 4, but it could sink to 100 or even lower if Reform continues its surge, meaning that Starmer would comfortably exceed Tony Blair‘s 179-seat majority in 1997.
Graphic showing all the seats at risk of a Labour ‘super majority’
Last week’s seismic YouGov poll, which put Reform ahead of the Tories for the first time, was the so-called ‘crossover’ moment that Rishi Sunak had dreaded
Senior Tories, led by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt , are now openly vocalising a previously private fear: that Farage’s candidates will split the Right-wing vote
Tory strategists hope to prevent a Starmer super-majority by persuading voters to back the Conservatives in seats where the combined Tory and Reform vote is larger than Labour’s – but where Starmer’s candidate would sneak through the middle if the vote remains divided.
It needs only a five per cent swing from Reform to the Tories in crunch constituencies to cut the projected Labour majority from 228 to 132 seats.
The Mail on Sunday has analysed the 40 seats where a vote for Reform is most likely to let Labour win the constituency.
Top of the list is Chatham and Aylesford, in Kent, where Dame Tracey Crouch is standing down as Tory MP.
Despite a Conservative majority of 18,540 in 2019, the most recent local polling puts Labour ahead – but by just 0.1 per cent.
So it would take only a handful of voters to switch from Reform’s Thomas Mallon to Tory candidate Nathan Gamester for the Conservatives to hold the seat.
Top of the list to get a labour super majority is Chatham and Aylesford, in Kent, where Dame Tracey Crouch is standing down as Tory MP
Labour leader Keir Starmer on the campaign trail. The local polling shows Reform on 14 per cent, highlighting how comfortably the two Right-wing parties would beat Labour if they joined forces
The local polling shows Reform on 14 per cent, highlighting how comfortably the two Right-wing parties would beat Labour if they joined forces.
Farage’s former party, Ukip, performed strongly in the seat, winning 19.9 per cent of votes in the 2015 election. Nearly two-thirds of the constituency voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
Second on the list of seats where a vote for Reform is likely to let in Labour is the formerly safe Tory constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, which was lost to Starmer last October in a by-election triggered by the resignation of former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries. Her 24,664 majority became a 1,192-vote victory for Labour.
Latest polling puts Starmer’s party ahead of the Tories by 0.3 per cent there, however, an estimated 12 per cent of voters are planning to back Reform.
Former Theresa May adviser Nick Timothy is defending a 23,194 majority won by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock in West Suffolk, but constituency polling by YouGov has Labour ahead by 0.4 per cent there.
But if the 14 per cent of local voters who are planning to endorse Reform’s David Bull backed the Tories instead, Timothy would win with a comfortable majority.
Even in the 40th constituency on our list, North Somerset, Tory candidate Liam Fox will be ruing the role being played by Farage’s candidate Alexander Kokkinoftas. Labour is ahead in the seat by 5.2 per cent, according to YouGov, but Reform’s support is running at 9.7 per cent – more then enough to swing it back to former Defence Secretary Fox.
The latest YouGov survey found Labour were supported by 38 per cent of voters ahead of the general election on 4 July, with the Conservatives backed by 18 per cent
Boris Johnson warned yesterday against the ‘Starmergeddon’ of a Labour super-majority, saying he feared that the ‘people of this country are going to send to Westminster such a vast wave of finger-jabbing, Palestinian flag-waving Corbynistas… that the governing party will have to occupy both sides of the House of Commons’. He wrote in his Daily Mail column: ‘On current predictions, Labour will have 461 MPs, the Tories will have 80 – and the overall majority for Keir Starmer will be 292.
‘Yes, it will not just be a majority bigger than Blair’s or Thatcher’s. The coming Labour majority, if these polls are correct, will be about as big as Blair’s and Thatcher’s majority COMBINED.’
The former Prime Minister added: ‘We must face the reality. Whatever the polls may say about the Reform surge, there is only one way to stop a Starmer government, or to reduce the size of a Starmer majority, and that is to vote Conservative.
‘Neither the Liberals nor Reform have the remotest chance of forming the Opposition – not in Parliament, not on the basis of the first-past-the-post system. Under that system, General Elections are a bit like having a very long bath – in that the water gently slooshes left and right and back again.
‘But if these numbers are right, the wave will be so big that it will wash right over the end of the bath in a cataclysm.’
